Posts Tagged ‘networking’

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege to attend, present and chair at the International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI) in Seville, Spain (18-20 November 2013). This came about due to the comprehensive research completed by a group of us at school, upon the request of our principal, into ‘ICT and Active Learning’. The investigation involved visiting a variety of innovative schools, surveying our own community and secondary research. The report ended up being 60 pages long and has resulted in the implementation of REAL (Relevant, Engaging, Active Learning), a concentrated effort for a paradigm shift to more student-centred learning in a Year 7 pilot program for 2014. Since we had already completed the research we wrote a couple of different abstracts to apply to present at international conferences and were surprised to be accepted by both. The school is paying for the Innovative Learning Team (ILT) to attend the International Conference on Learning in New York, July 2014, so couldn’t send us to the ICERI one too. I therefore asked for leave and attended under my own steam (except for accommodation). I also gained permission to add a couple of days in Paris to visit my 16 year old daughter on school exchange there. From lift-off to landing I was gone for a total of 9 days, only absent (in body) from school for 5 of them.

So why would I go to so much expense, effort and jet lag to be at ICERI 2013? Put simply, the experience.

For the first time I’ve had an academic conference paper published (with my two colleagues, Melissa Carson and Nick Cook). Although it’s not the level of a peer-reviewed journal, it’s still something. It had to be submitted back in October; I wrote it during the school holidays, heavily based on our report for the principal.

For the first time I’ve presented at an international conference. I was the first to present during my session, forgot to mention a couple of key points, but generally thought it went well. We were asked to use either Adobe Acrobat (pdf) or PowerPoint for our presentations. I was quite pleased with my slides, prepared the day before I left and I wrote what I said during the flight over. I was asked which I thought should come first, the pedagogy or the technology, and I replied quite definitely, the pedagogy, but what I’ve read since has made me question my decisiveness a little.

For the first time ever (beyond the classroom) I’ve chaired a session of presentations. This meant I had to introduce each of the presenters with a supplied biography, pronounce their names as correctly as I could, and ensure they adhered to the tight time regulations. The duo that followed me were speaking for a couple of minutes before I remembered I had to time them but I recovered and nobody knew. The next presenter was so nervous that I concentrated too much on calming and preparing her that I forgot to introduce her. She ran out of time so I concluded with a comment about how fast the time slips away when up front that I also forgot to introduce her and did it then, at the end of her talk. From then on I was much better and even managed to gain a laugh with my comments about the last speaker’s presentation.

Of course there is the added benefit of the credibility it provides to me and my school.

Unlike the various school conferences I’ve attended, this conference was wholly based on academic research. Each presentation went for 15 minutes and I attended approximately 50 of them on a wide range of topics. Some were highly technical analysis of statistics that bored me but then I was often surprised by the interest some audience members displayed in the following Q&A. Most presentations had something that fascinated me.

The other important aspect of the conference was simply talking with other earnest educators, the vast majority being from universities around the world.

Before the conference, I had already connected with @davidwebster (David Webster – University of Gloucestershire) via Twitter through the hash-tag #iceri2013 and found each other in person during the first break.

At the first day’s lunch I sat next to Tony Scafide of SUNY Oneonta (USA) and we talked intensely all lunch and throughout the cocktail party the following night about life, the universe and everything.

On the second day I lunched with Ruth Bridgstock (QUT) and Margaret Mackay (University of Portsmouth) and we discussed how people learn and how to motivate students and teachers to want to learn (without finding definitive answers).

It was truly an international conference. In my session alone the presenters were from Norway, Nigeria, Israel, Poland and Turkey. But I must say, for a conference about innovation in learning, Twitter was rather quiet.

Overall, despite the rotten cold I had the entire time I was away (and still), it was the conversations with intelligent and passionate people in education that will stay with me the longest. It motivates me to continue with my study, my teaching and my interest in student-centred learning. Somebody described me as a border collie, meaning I’m the one who rounds everyone up, gathering them in to try and face them in the right direction. I think that is a pretty good summary and a conference like this will keep the wag in my tail a little bit longer.

When I started teaching six years ago, having previously been in the corporate world, I was keen to show students, particularly in Business Studies, the real world, beyond the textbook. The students were bemused by my approach of constantly showing via the web how real businesses and other institutions actually operated. The textbook is great for providing neat answers in the structure of the syllabus, particularly for exam preparation, but for real life learning we need to go far beyond the books. Textbooks are ideal for students who are good at memorising and regurgitating information for exams that are merely a passport for the next stage of study in life. Not that this works for all subjects. In Economics I keep telling my students that memorising the textbook will only give them a mark up to 80% because they need to demonstrate analysis and informed opinion to achieve any higher. However, education at all levels should be about learning for life and about life and not be just about final results in the HSC and equivalent ‘finals’.

Real life now involves various forms of social media. I joined Twitter at the start of 2009 but didn’t actually participate until about half way through the year. I also use Facebook but purely as a social network. Twitter is my professional network. At times it is overwhelming due to how much knowledge other educators in the world have about various web applications and how to use them in the classroom, plus the time they have to post about it, not only on Twitter but through blogs too. I often feel guilty that I am merely a Twitter trawler since I retrieve so much information from it while giving very little back. When I do give back, it sometimes feels I am speaking to a void, but not for long.

The biggest impact Twitter has had on my classroom so far is an idea I had to connect students in my Society and Culture class with Vietnamese students to help them with a case study they were doing on various aspects of life in Vietnam. Through the retweets of some of my followers and the consequent passing on of names of teachers in Vietnam I was connected with a teacher in Hanoi. He established a blog where my students and a class within his school introduced themselves to each other before my students asked questions relevant to their case study. It has been very exciting to see the project start to unfold. Two of the Vietnamese students expressed very different opinions about the role of power and authority in both schools and government within Vietnam in response to a question from one of my students. It showed my students different perspectives that they could never learn from a textbook or an official information website. At the moment we are keeping the blog private since the students are still learning about appropriate use of blogs, not that there have been any problems to date. However, it has stalled momentarily due to Australia’s summer holidays. I’m looking forward to the return of school to move it along further. This is the third time I have taught this unit but it is the first time it has sparked a desire in me to visit Vietnam. The personal touch really does have an amazing effect.

The same class also has a public blog to maintain a journal for their Personal Interest Project. It opens up an opportunity for them to receive feedback about their ideas. Again, Twitter has been the means for finding the few people who have provided some very constructive thoughts for my students.

The next exciting project that has come from Twitter was purely by accident in the last few hours. I was merely thinking out loud and feeling silly for posting it at all when I typed in exactly the maximum 140 characters: Thinking about teaching research methodologies by having Yr 12 students film 30 sec demos of each method with target audience of new Yr 11s. Within minutes a teacher from the USA sent me a direct message offering his 14 year old students as a target audience. We have set a date for late February for my students to have the videos ready.

I am constantly astounded by the connections I make and this is despite having fewer than 150 followers, a small number compared to some of the educators I follow with 1000s of followers. Through Twitter I also discover new resources, many of which I won’t ever use but some I will and as a result my students will also expand their learning. I can spend hours every day just reading posts and the weblinks they contain but I need to just opt in and out as I want and not become obsessive about it. I had a few weeks over Christmas where I didn’t do any work for school so I also chose not to touch Twitter either. I came back refreshed. I once showed my Society and Culture students how I use Twitter and one asked, “Do you ever sleep?” I laughed and said I didn’t sleep enough but asked if she reads everything posted on Facebook, her main online social medium. She doesn’t.

Twitter is an amazing resource helping me to create an environment of authentic learning. In just over two weeks I will be back in the classroom after a long summer holiday, armed with new ideas and excited by the prospects they hold. Stay tuned to see how they go.